If you have ever played a game of charades, then you know that communicating ideas without using words can be a lot harder than you think. Now, imagine being in a loud environment or another place where you could not verbally communicate with another person. For many, the words frustration, stress, or even panic would come to mind.
It’s a lot easier said than done. However, if you were to have a look round your hometown or city, your place of work, your local school, the road, the hospital, there are countless examples of communicating through colours and symbols that you understand almost instinctively.
What is the secret? How do you get across important information so quickly and easily? Well, it’s no secret, and there is an international governing body concerned precisely with this. The ISO7010’s purpose is to produce a range of globally recognisable safety pictograms. That means anyone around the world could walk past a sign and be able to make out what it means without difficulty. The ISO7010 regulations come from International Organisation for Standardisation, confusingly called ISO for short, and comes from the Greek word ‘isos’ according to some sources. ISO is responsible for creating international standards for technical and non-technical fields, making sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to signage as well as other important regulations. Having existed in some form or another since 1926, ISO are the de facto choice for international standards and you aren’t a trusted company unless you have your relevant ISO certifications.
Let’s investigate how the ISO7010 achieves this communicability. Firstly, the ISO7010 categorises these symbols into five distinct categories. These include prohibition signs, mandatory signs, warning signs, fire equipment signs, and safe conditions and first aid signs. All of these come with their own colour coding, with prohibition and fire equipment being red, mandatory being blue, warning signs being yellow, and safe condition and first aid signs being green. The choice of colours for these signs taps into our cultural conditioning of colours as well as our psychological response to these colours. Naturally, any red sign denotes an urgency that prompts our attention. For example, looking at the fire protection door sign F007, we see the pictogram of a door ajar with an arrow pointing to the door’s exit with flames to the right of the sign. Through literal pictograms, the uniformity of fire equipment signs and the implied urgency aids in helping the user understand the sign, even if the user has never come across it before. Patterns emerge when you start to look at more and more of these signs, such as the fire pictogram always being on the right-hand side and being identical, this consistency helps put two and two together.
Fortunately for us, when it comes to signs in the workplace, it is not a guessing game. Chances are you will be taught what the signs means when you come across them and that you have resources to resort to or a more experienced employee to consult if there is a sign you do not know.
Heskins can provide all ISO7010 compliant signs that your company needs to stay safe and be the best version of yourselves. You’ve read that right; we can create and print any of the 300+ ISO 7010 symbols that you need. Whether you need them on the floor, on the wall, to glow in the dark, we are the go-to place for it all.
You can check out our signage section on our website as well as the services we provide to see how we can customise these signs for you. If you have any questions about our signage solutions, get in touch. We would love to hear from you.
